DEATH QUOTES XIII

quotations about death

Do not fear death so much, but rather the inadequate life.

BERTOLT BRECHT

The Mother


I feel strongly, because a man who will himself die one day in the not to distant future and, also, as a psychiatrist who spent decades dealing with death anxiety, that confronting death allows us, not to open some noisome, Pandora's box, but to re-enter life in a richer, more compassionate manner.

IRVIN D. YALOM

interview, Wise Counsel


The death for the driver was egregiously bad: being impaled is never anyone's exit of choice.

JEFF ABBOTT

The Last Minute


We're all embers from the same fire. Our ember winks out, we're ashes, we go back to the fire.

WILLIAM SHATNER

Esquire Magazine, May 2012


You still believe in death... that's just so... quaint. Well, sorry to pop your death bubble, but there's no such thing. So make the best of things. Any real belief in death is just wishful thinking. Don't waste good drugs on killing yourself. Share them with friends and have a party. Or send them to me.

CHUCK PALAHNIUK

The Independent Review, Mar. 25, 2004


Always the idea of unbroken quiet broods around the grave. It is a port where the storms of life never beat, and the forms that have been tossed on its chafing waves lie quiet forevermore. There the child nestles peacefully as ever it lay in its mother's arms, and the workman's hands lie still by his side, and the thinker's brain is pillowed in silent mystery, and the poor girl's broken heart is steeped in a balm that extracts its secret woe, and is in the keeping of a charity that covers all blame.

E. H. CHAPIN

Living Words


Death! great proprietor of all! 'tis thine
To tread out empire, and to quench the stars.

EDWARD YOUNG

Night Thoughts


My only fear of death is reincarnation.

TUPAC SHAKUR

"No More Pain"


O the anguish of that thought that we can never atone to our dead for the stinted affection we gave them, for the light answers we returned to their plaints or their pleadings, for the little reverence we showed to that sacred human soul that lived so close to us, and was the divinest thing God had given us to know!

GEORGE ELIOT

Amos Barton


O, the one happiness, when, out of breath,
Our feet slip, and we stumble upon death!

ARTHUR SYMONS

"The Beggars"


Death is not a self-evident phenomenon. The margins between life and death are socially and culturally constructed, mobile, multiple, and open to dispute and reformulation.

MARGARET LOCK

Twice Dead


In accepting death as inevitable, we don't label it as a good thing or a bad thing. As one of my teachers once said to me, "Death happens. It is just death, and how we meet it is up to us."

JOAN HALIFAX

Being with Dying


Whatever it is that occurs at death, I believe it deserves to be called a miracle. The miracle, ironically, is that we don't die. The cessation of the body is an illusion, and like a magician sweeping aside a curtain, the soul reveals what lies beyond.

DEEPAK CHOPRA

Life After Death


Death will come and it will have your eyes.

CESARE PAVESE

Death Will Come and It Will Have Your Eyes


Death, lonely death,
Beneath the withered leaves.

FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA

Blood Wedding


How wonderful is Death,
Death and his brother Sleep!

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

Queen Mab


I am stigmatized by a living death in which real death holds no terrors for me.

ANTONIN ARTAUD

Selected Writings


The thorn of death falls from heaven, and its myriad forms leave us no room to move.

KOBO ABE

The Woman in the Dunes


Death ain't nothing but a fastball on the outside corner.

AUGUST WILSON

Fences


Death left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret.

MICHEL FOUCAULT

The Birth of the Clinic